Exercise Can Beat The Obesity Gene

If you were to see an article from the Archives of Internal Medicine titled “Physical Activity and the Association of Common FTO Gene Variants With Body Mass Index and Obesity“, I would not blame you if you didn’t read it all the way to its conclusion! But while most arcanely titled pieces of text are doomed to go largely unread, it would be a shame if you were to miss this all important conclusion:

“Our results strongly suggest that the increased risk of obesity owing to genetic susceptibility by FTO variants can be blunted through physical activity. These findings emphasize the important role of physical activity in public health efforts to combat obesity, particularly in genetically susceptible individuals.”

That’s right: exercise can beat the obesity gene! (at least that is what the above would say once translated into English!)

The “fat mass and obesity related gene” is commonly called FTO and a group of researchers from the University of Maryland set out to investigate the effects of exercise on those with single or even multiple variants of this gene. They picked about 700 Amish men and women to figure out how these plain and simple folk (who vigorously shun contact with the rest of the country and continue to avoid modern technology) manage to avoid becoming obese even though their diet consists mainly of refined carbohydrates, sugar and fat.

The answer is quite simply that these people burn an amazing number of calories in their quest to use human labor for most tasks and avoiding machinery wherever possible. Numbers in the order of 900 calories a day have been quoted and that is a lot by any standard of exercise (jogging an entire hour would burn “just” 400!). That vigorous (or even medium-paced, but long bouts of) exercise can even overcome the “natural tendency” of our bodies - as defined by our genes - is a profound discovery and certainly one that should spur the more fatalistic among us to action.

Evadnie Rampersaud, a co-author of this study, says: “Obesity isn’t really determined by genetics, but by environmental factors. We’re not doomed to become obese because we have this gene that we may or may not know about. By living a healthy lifestyle, getting physical activity, eating a proper diet, you can actually impact the final outcome.” [Time]

Genes, while certain types of them may certainly be present in our bodies, need the right stimulus and environmen to actually “turn on”. I say, in the case of villainous ones like the FTO, we exercise hard and leave it “off”!